The Old West was full of larger than life characters: Buffalo
Bill Cody, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Annie Oakley,
Wild Bill Hickok, Belle Starr, Jesse James, Billy the Kid. Everyone
knows the story of the OK Corral, how the Earps and Doc Holliday
faced off against the Clantons and some other guys, how Pat Garrett
shot Billy The Kid, how Cool Hand Luke ate fifty eggs... oh,
wait, that was a movie. But Paul Newman and George Kennedy were
in it, and they made a lot of westerns. And let's not forget
about Strother Martin. Anyway, the lore of the West has fascinated
us for a hundred years and spawned a hundred tales (give or take.
The lawyers made us put that in).

One of the most notorious gunmen of the Old
West was "Angry Bill" Boskovitch. Boskovitch gave his
favorite pastime as "shootin' folks". It must have
been a hobby he enjoyed immensely, as by the time of his death
he had killed 4,274 men, women and children (he liked killing
animals, too, but no one kept an accurate count). One reason
for this astonishingly high body count is that towards the end
of his life, as his reputation grew, it became a great honor
to be shot by Angry Bill. Wherever he went, people would come
from miles around to provoke him to violence. "Nyah, nyah,
barrel-eyes, can't hit the side of a barn!", they would
taunt. While this almost always resulted in a fatal shooting,
it did insure a sort of immortality and gave one's family something
to brag about.

Perhaps the most vicious killer in the West
was Wilfred Skagg. Skagg showed a mean streak from an early age.
Angered by being named "Wilfred", he shot his parents
at age 4 and went on a killing spree that even Billy the Kid
called "an inspiration". Having read that John Wesley
Hardin once "shot a man just for snoring", Skagg outdid
him by shooting a man just for adhering to Hegel's philosophy
of Phenomenology of Mind. "The ultimate truth of the universal
is self-conscious of itself as absolute spirit, my eye!",
he sneered, standing over the man's twitching corpse. Not content
with killing those who differed with him philosophically, Skagg
killed people for all sorts of reasons: wearing spurs that jingle
jangle jingle, eating hominy out of season, having been born
in Wisconsin and using the word "varmint" in a Scrabble
game. He met his demise as he had lived, violently. He was playing
poker in a saloon when a crazed Lithuanian, mistaking him for
Archduke Franz Josef Habsburgh, stabbed him repeatedly with a
salad fork. The hand he was holding, five deuces, became known
as "a bunch of cards with blood all over them".

Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickok weren't the
only famous lawmen who sometimes trod both sides of justice.
A famous gunslinger turned lawman turned gunslinger turned lawman
turned nun turned gunslinger was Alonzo Pepper. Pepper, besides
having serious identity issues, knew that the best way to enforce
the law was to think like an outlaw. He did this so well that
he frequently robbed banks "just for research", although
he always kept the money. During his last period of lawlessness
he teamed up with the notorious Blanche Terwilliger, aka "Dance
Hall Minnie". The two of them cut a swath across New Mexico
until they realized they'd left the gas on and went back. Returning
to their swath, they were ambushed by "Waco Jack" Dullard,
the sheriff of Taos. His deed was immortalized in the "Ballad
of Dullard", although the ballad took several liberties
with the facts (for example, Dullard claims he shot Alonzo and
Minnie while they were robbing the Tucson stage. Actually, they
were sleeping). Dullard later became governor of California.

Blanche Terwilliger wasn't as famous as Belle
Starr or Calamity Jane, but she was much more famous than Saluda
Montez, aka "Mexican Kate". No one knew why Mexican
Kate was notorious; historians think it was an effective PR campaign.
A more well documented Lady of the West was Etta Winchester,
aka "Morey Amsterdam". Etta began her career as a dance
hall girl, worked her way up to madam but, hitting the prostitution
glass ceiling, turned to a life of crime. She was hanged in Tombstone
on August 8, 1899, the last woman hanged there since the previous
Thursday.

Many a tome has been written about the Old
West. Why does it fascinate us so, even to this day? Is it a
longing for a bygone era when a man lived by his wits and his
word? The freedom, the pioneer spirit, the total lack of personal
hygiene and respect for human life? Hegel said it best: "These
people are crazy!"